Joita Das

Background

Joita Das is from Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal in eastern India, although she spent much of her childhood in Pune, Maharashtra and a few years abroad in Dubai, UAE too, where she did much of her initial schooling.

She completed her undergraduate studies (B.A.) from Azim Premji University, India, with a Major in Combined Humanities and a Minor in Media, Society and Development. Joita holds an M.A. in a similar, interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences programme from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), India, where she also held a Teaching Assistant position during her candidature. Joita is the recipient of IITGN’s President’s Gold Medal and Institute Gold Medal awards for academic excellence.

Asian Languages

Joita can speak Bengali and Hindi fluently. At NUS, she is also studying Mandarin Chinese to aid her doctoral research and hopes to achieve at least intermediate-level proficiency in the language in the next few years.

Research Interests

Given her incredibly interdisciplinary education thus far, Joita’s academic interests straddle multiple fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences, although her doctoral research draws primarily from History. Her research at NUS will aim at a comparative study of the overseas Chinese communities of South Asia and Southeast Asia by exploring migration patterns and movement in the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and South China Sea regions between the 18^th and 20^th centuries that bound South Asia to Southeast Asia in complex social and cultural networks. Her research hopes to add to the scholarship that has already been produced on the overseas Chinese, by recognizing that previous research on this topic primarily centred around China’s relationship to Southeast Asia alone and neglected South Asia as a comparable part of this larger transnational network of migration. Joita is also interested in looking at questions of ‘hybridity,’ that emerged as a key characteristic of the identities of the overseas Chinese communities of Singapore and Kolkata.

Joita has a keen interest in oral history and the history of the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition, as well, having previously conducted primary research in these areas as part of her post-graduate studies at IITGN. Joita has also worked as an intern with the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, where she recorded and documented interviews with notable Indian scientists and ecologists for the archive’s oral history collection.